About Me

Sunday, 9 February 2014

To Repeat, What Foreign Policy?

This
was written in June 1910. Has anything
changed, or if so, inevitably, has it changed for the worst?

Among the forgotten nooks and crannies of Westminster
there is a little place, well a big one, called the Foreign Office. Once it was the Mount
Everest of the Civil Service but like the mountain is now a much
visited tourist attraction.

Also
it is strewn with the litter of visitors, liable to cause unpredictable damage
and has lost both its mystery and purpose.
It has been redecorated recently but we may need to restore it to its
former glory of function.

The
Foreign Office was one of the first Whitehall
departments to assume a more modern form back in 1782. The two separate departments that had dealt
with matters in foreign parts, the Northern and Southern Departments were
merged into one.

It
was Jeremy Sneyd, Head of the Northern Department and former Private Secretary
to Prime Ministers, who is regarded as the person responsible.

Jeremy,
born in County Cavan, whose maternal
grandfather had King Charles II for a Godfather, and who rode with the Government
cavalry at Preston in 1745, was close to Sheridan
and his circle. In the past he had paid
off Goldsmith’s liabilities to his servants and associated ladies.

He
was probably the man who arranged the bail outs to some of those worst affected
in the Great Crash of 1772. At least it
gave him a property in Cleveland Row by Clarence House, a handsome estate in
Hampshire and an acquaintance with the Austen’s. This is the essential tradition of the FO,
insider knowledge is a wonderful thing to have.

However,
the bringing together of the opposing elements in handling Britain’s
relationships with the world did not mean ending the conflicts. It internalised and disguised them. Many times in the recent past our Foreign
Policy, such as it was, lurched from one stance to an opposing idea and from
one hasty deal to another that was even more hasty and ill advised.

At
least much of the policy was at least our own and as far as possible in our own
interests, as the government determined.
Posterity often disagrees but history is a moveable feast.

From
time to time it involved making deals with more or fewer other governments
jointly and with respect to their needs.
By and large, however, we remained free from permanent set up’s which
fixed the ways and means of conducting international relationships. After the debacle of World War I, this
changed.

There
was now a League of Nations and a growing
number of bodies and other organisations to which we became committed. At the end of World War II with now the American’s
involved as well as many others the number of international bodies, agencies,
treaty commitments and other forms of negotiation and decision increased
rapidly and extensively.

By
the 1960’s it was impossible to conduct any sort of independent policy. The major constraint was the Cold War need to
follow the American’s, but there were others.
We liked to claim that we led the way but only like a poodle leads its
mistress.

In
the 1970’s we bought a ticket to the Great Maze of Europe and since then the
only diplomatic triumphs our politicians have claimed are those where they have
taken on more binding commitments, membership of this or that at a huge price and
giving away both our law and sovereignty to more or less anyone who asked for
it.

In
the last three years the world has turned.
Just as Foreign Policy and Foreign Affairs was relegated to one of the disregarded
and last of the interests of our media and under Blair and Brown the least
comfortable seat in the sofa of government, we may well need to learn how to do
it for ourselves all over again. We can
no longer play “Follow The Leader” because we do not have any leaders any more.

But
the Foreign Office is no longer what it was.
Like the rest of Whitehall it has been hollowed out of its essential
past functions and turned into another PR/Management freak exercise meeting
targets for sales talks, sales fairs, sales conventions, contact lists media
spin circuses and attending meetings on how to keep all our masters happy.

The
baby that was the capability for analysis of information and intelligence as a
basis for policy has been thrown out with the bathwater of real international
communication.

One
of the main problems this or any government faces is with the radical change in
the way the world works, who matters and we our need to formulate and structure
a well thought out and effective Foreign Policy.

To
do that the Foreign Office has to change again and soon. It no longer means churning out reams of
garbage based on redundant management and financial theory or fancy fictions
about how we intend to make Ruritania's in revolt and chaos our kind of place.

You
cannot run a real foreign policy on the notion of added value. Also the Foreign Office is not there just to
be a sales office, agency for the latest financial dross dreamed up in The City
or a personal service for all those Brit’s who travel abroad and find out the
hard way that others have different ideas about personal conduct.

We
have a Foreign Office but need a real foreign policy. The present office would not know where to
look for or recognise one if it found it.